Examining high modernist and neoliberal forms of urbanism, this volume explores how housing raises a series of vexing issues surrounding rights, identity, governance, and justice in the modern city. The volume analyzes the ways in which homeownership and other types of housing tenure embody suppositions about the proper nature of the urban order, such as the rights of citizenship, ideologies of the nation, and forms of spatial development. Through finely detailed studies that illuminate national and regional particularities— including analyses of urbanism in the Soviet Union, the post-Katrina reconstruction of New Orleans, and squatting in contemporary Lima— the volume underscores how housing questions matter in a wide range of contexts. Drawing on approaches from architecture, sociology, anthropology, history, and geography, the book develops an interdisciplinary, integrated perspective. This approach illuminates ruptures and continuities between high modernist and neoliberal forms of urbanism, ultimately demonstrating how housing and the dilemmas surrounding it are central to modern governance.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Edward Murphy

I. Modernist Planning Reconsidered

1. The transnationalization of the ‘housing problem’: social sciences and developmentalism in postwar Argentina, Leandro Benmergui2. Modernity unbound: Tol'iatti as the new Soviet city par excellence, Lewis H. Siegelbaum3. Infrastructural thinking: urban housing in former Czechoslovakia from the Stalin era to EU accession, Kimberly Elman Zarecor4. The politics of housing in a divided city: examples from Berlin, Carolyn Loeb

9. Between housing and home: a dilemma for citizenship, a challenge for analysis (notes from Chile), Edward Murphy10. Citizenship and the city: creating a new infrastructure of belonging, Tony Samara11. Recognizing (dis)order: topographies of power and property in Lima’s Periphery, Kristin Skrabut